Deprecation campaign

[Matthias Andree]

Am 17.03.2011 11:36, schrieb Pietro Cerutti:
>> all these efforts to rescue the ports are all good, but: do we actually
>> _need_ the ports?  Just having one more port isn't a value in itself.
>
> It's a potential value. Having one port less is a potential loss.

Unless there is another one to take over.

>> And if yes, can someone step up to become maintainer of the port,
>> meaning, upgrade it to new versions, sort FreeBSD bug reports and
>> forward/file them with the upstream authors, and all that?
>
> Well, this is not how it works. There are a lot of old ports which
> are not being developped upstreams anymore. Probably nobody is
> interested in maintaining those, because there's nothing to do to those
> ports other than fixing potential build problems. However, this doesn't
> imply that the port is useless or that nobody's interested in using it.
> Not all consumers of FreeBSD ports follow ports at .

But exactly in such situations ("nothing to do") being a maintainer is 
an extremely low effort because you hardly ever get input, but you are 
sort of a godfather to the port in case it fails.  And it's prudent for 
a maintainer to ask for help anyways.

> I'd be very carful on killing ports. I agree on killing BROKEN ports
> where the distfiles are not fetchable anymore. In this case, nobody can
> benefit from having the (non working) port. But I wouldn't go further.
>
> And I'd welcome ANY effort to resurrect a port or make it workable
> again, even if it does not imply setting a real MAINTAINER.

I've done steps towards getting gpart working again, but I fear we'll be 
running in circles unless ports are maintained.   I've taken 
maintainership of gpart now based on my own argument written above.

And while I haven't fully audited gpart or looked through its code, the 
first impression was "not stellar but reasonably OK with some 
portability headaches" so it's probably reasonably low profile, too.

Best regards

-- 
Matthias Andree
ports committer